He wanted to assemble a book, Chris Ware says, "that has no beginning and no end, in the way that our memories have no beginning and no end."

So, the cartoonist set 14 pieces of a puzzle -- a game board, a thin hardcover, various leaflets, a Sunday comics' section and that Little Golden Book -- into a box labeled "Building Stories," and included neither timeline nor blueprint.

"When you meet people," Ware reminds us -- and inside this curious box, we meet the residents of a 98-year-old building in Chicago, as well as the best of the neighborhood bees -- "you don't get their capsule biography. You piece together a person through anecdotes, gestures, any number of things."

Chris WareNPR

And by presenting a number of things that can be arranged in any order, Ware allows us to come to know his characters in a way that is as complicated and nonlinear as memory itself, rife with half-truths and elaborate fictions.

"It reflects the way we remember the world, rather than the way we experience it," Ware says.

That's just the beginning of what the cartoonist manages to do in "Building Stories," inside and far outside the box.

Ware -- who appeared with Chip Kidd Tuesday night in a Portland Arts & Lectures' event at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall -- is an unassuming rock star in the comics' world.

He is so widely admired because he has such faith in the medium's ability to push the narrative arc beyond the limits of prose and into the realm of music.

"Art Spiegelman has a great quote: Comics are the art of turning time back into space," Ware says, and he fills that space in extraordinary ways.

His central character, a florist with a prosthetic leg ("It's pretty simple: lake ... boat ... motor ... me"), sits with her loneliness on a park bench, reflecting on how often she has been trapped in the background of someone else's family photograph, and muses, "Maybe there's someone, somewhere, who's noticed me in one, and thinks I'm interesting or even attractive."

In the middle of lunch with her daughter, a mother disappears into the dream of finding her book in the bookstore. The building contemplates its biography. And Branford the bee finds himself inexplicably trapped on the wrong side of a basement window, and laments, "I have suffered a dreadful deliverance."

But Ware also believes in the singular architecture of the comics' landscape, and the beauty of these pages -- in both pamphlet and broad sheet -- keeps the reader inside the box even as Ware's complex conceit gains velocity.

"When I began drawing, there was a culture of contempt around comics," Ware told me outside the library of the Heathman Hotel. The biting cynicism of the undergrounds "metastasized into something a little more biting, a guilty-until-proven-innocent quality.

"I wanted to bring some beauty to comics, not that they didn't have it before." He has long admired the clarity of what Frank King brought to "Gasoline Alley" for almost 33 years. "I thought that bloodline in comics had been abandoned in the '30s and '40s, and I wanted to pick it up again."

The effect is often liberating and sometimes misleading. Not all of his pages come with instructions on where to begin and where to end: "Some pages, I've tried to make pointed and clear, almost like circuitry. In others, I'll produce a panel of uncertainty, so it's unclear where you're supposed to read next.

"Sometimes, that's an accident, and I just leave it. That's the way we remember things.

"I want (the pages) to be as complicated as life is, hopefully," Ware says. "I want it to go down as easy as cough syrup. But once it's read, I hope the events, the textures and the characters develop with the same uncertainty we have about our own life."

When we tell our own stories, he notes, "We're all unreliable narrators."

Ware estimates that he spent almost six years cobbling "Building Stories" together. He is not shy about the challenge he set for himself -- "There are moments when you are the most yourself, when you have a sense of what life is about, and I wanted to see if comics could sustain that" -- but he is reticent about the result:

"I still have a lot to figure out. I don't feel like I've accomplished anything yet. I'm still experimenting."

And if this experiment doesn't convince the reader to work as hard as the artist has?

"You can throw it away after 15 minutes," Ware says. "It's recyclable. That's one of the beauties of comics. I want to do something that has a certain beauty to it, but, ultimately, it's all just ink on paper, and can be thrown away with very little regret."